


In Sad or Singing Weather

by Caia (Caius)



Category: DCU, Flash - Fandom
Genre: Flash Rogues ficathon, Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-03
Updated: 2006-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-03 08:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caius/pseuds/Caia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A version of Weather Wizard's origin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Sad or Singing Weather

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://teekoness.livejournal.com/profile)[**teekoness**](http://teekoness.livejournal.com/) in the Flash Rogues Ficathon. Belatedly.  
> Acknowledgement: Thanks to [](http://devilc.livejournal.com/profile)[**devilc**](http://devilc.livejournal.com/) for beta, to [](http://littledarkvoice.livejournal.com/profile)[**littledarkvoice**](http://littledarkvoice.livejournal.com/) for prereading, and to [](http://petronelle.livejournal.com/profile)[**petronelle**](http://petronelle.livejournal.com/) and [](http://plainsong-x.livejournal.com/profile)[**plainsong_x**](http://plainsong-x.livejournal.com/) for titular assistance.

It would have been easier if he *had* killed Clyde. It's not, after all, as if anyone believes he didn't, not any more, even if no one could ever find proof.

Sometimes even Mark believes it now.

\--

In the spring, there were two little boys. Clyde Mardon had a weak heart, and to make up for it (and perhaps also for his first name, which Mrs. Mardon, in moments of passion, occasionally claimed should have been Mark's in the first place) his parents gave him the best of everything.

If they'd taken more care for evil brewing in their other son's heart, things might have turned out differently.

One year, they both asked for a chemistry set. Clyde was fascinated by science; Mark was fascinated by poisons and explosions.

Clyde received it. Mark, who could, after all, play *outside* like an ordinary boy, received a baseball bat with instructions to go outside and use it.

He did.

When word reached his parents, he got the whipping of his life and was confined to the house for a week, under surveillance and instruction *not* to disturb his brother (who had a weak heart, after all, and was growing to be a new Einstein!).

It rained all of that week.

At the end of the week, the family had more or less forgotten about the debacle with the bat. Clyde was doing wonders with his new chemistry set, they all agreed, and if said wonders had a tendency to wind up on top of half-open doors or under people's pillows--well, it was probably time Mark was released, the boy had so much energy.

Every single time, Clyde brought home A's on tests and exams and report cards. Every single time, he got to go out for ice cream.

When Mark tried it, he got sent to the principal's for cheating, and got the second worst whipping of his life. He had, of course. It still wasn't fair.

\---

In the summer, there were two young men. One was in jail, the other in college. The same year, their mother died in a car accident and their father's heart gave out--it ran in the family, poor man, and between his son's delinquency and his wife's death, who could be surprised?

Mark didn't, quite, manage to make a break for it at his father's funeral. The solemnity of the occasion distracted him, he claimed; perhaps the way the whole family was looking at him accusingly distracted him more.

Or maybe it was merely the electrical storm that broke out, fast and hot and furious, as the first shovels of dirt were put on top of Michael John Mardon's grave.

To no one's surprise, most of the property went to Clyde. He didn't, exactly, offer his brother a share, but he did bail him out and offer him a place to stay the second time Mark got caught. Clyde *needed* the money for his experiments. He wanted to save the world.

Mark accepted the bail, if not the lodgings or the guilt that went with them. His profession gave him his own way of claiming what was his.

\---

In the fall, there was a criminal and a scientist.

Mark was fresh off the most thorough and humiliating conviction of his life. Going to do hard time, too, on a third offense, this time for stealing his own brother's money. The weather, when he jumped off prisoners' train car, was cool and windy, enough noise and disruption to hide an escape, not enough to hinder it too much; almost as if it had been designed for him.

Clyde was triumphant in his laboratory. He had conquered what no man had before; visions of ending famine and draught and flood, controlling hurricanes and blizzards and monsoons, all for the good of the human race, danced in his head, heedless of his weak heart, almost heedless of his delicate equipment.

He and his dreams might even have survived, had his brother's train taken a different route. As it was, it was true that Mark did not *find* him dead. It just sounded better that way, in the reports, since he didn't kill him, either, nor did he especially attempt to resuscitate, being distracted by the equipment and notes in the laboratory. Mark was a practical man, more so than his brother; nothing had been given to *him* after all, save for his good first name.

Nevertheless, he didn't kill his brother, save in the most indirect of ways. When Mark tore into the room, seeking shelter, Clyde was doing the final test of his equipment; he turned around at his brother's yell, "Clyde! You need to help me!"

"Mark?" he said, weakly. "You can't be here, now..." and collapsed against the bank of instruments.

"Clyde?" asked Mark. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," said Clyde, "I've saved the world." And he died.

\---

In the winter, there was a rogue.

No one knows *exactly* what went through Mark's head as he watched his brother die; whether he felt any remorse before turning to the more interesting question of what, exactly, Clyde may have discovered, and how it might be useful to *him*, Mark Mardon, in particular.

What we do know, is that soon enough Mark taken all his (limited, short-sighted) childhood skill in turning Clyde's inventions to his own interests, and the man that came out of Clyde Mardon's last home was no longer Mark Mardon, two-bit burglar, but the Weather Wizard, one of a new breed of supervillain.

One cold day, after a fortuitous team-up that, nonetheless, ended up in a near-total rout by a hero nearly as new as they were, Mardon found himself sitting across the table from a costumed criminal with ambitions as much broader as his powers were more limited.

"I'm forming a Brotherhood of Rogues," said Captain Cold. "Do you want in?" Behind the visor was as much threat as invitation.

"A brotherhood, eh?" Mark thought fleetingly of brothers, and wondered if Cold had any. "What's in it for me?"


End file.
